Save Money By Reloading Brass

It’s often believed that people
choose to make their own ammunition from new and recycled brass to save money.
But for competitive shooters, who are lately confronted with even more targets
placed at ranges exceeding 300 yards, accuracy or the lack of it is rarely
consistently achieved
withre-manufactured .223 round. Missing even one target
set past 100 yards can quickly rack up match-losing penalties.

In addition, a malfunctioning rifle
round
tancank what should be a quick, turn-and-burn rifle stage. When a match
goes south because
a round did not load properly in the rifle barrel or it
failed to “pew” altogether as it should routinely scorches the psyche of even
the coolest competitor. It is tough to
learn that just one or two poorly manufactured rounds that
ed to an ill-fated
course of fire were inconsistent in length, weight, bearing surface,
concentricity. These are only a few of the other dozens of gauges that
distinguish good-as-gold ammunition from what those of us at the match like to
call, “crap ammo.
”

A shooter who just wondering when
the next malfunctioning round is going to cycle into his gun is already
unnerved and off his game. Shooters who reload often got started to avoid these
problems and feel the confidence gained from controlling the quality of their
ammunition first-hand.

If your plan is to reload so you have a nice
supply of accurate, match quality ammunition that you control, keep in mind
reloading for precision and match-grade quality is almost comparable to
alchemy. Creating the perfect box of
perfect, shiny, gold rifle rounds is labor intensive and requires that every,
single aspect of the cartridge- from the neck to the primer pocket is uniform
in weight, length, concentricity, and bearing surface. And this is before you
even worry about the bullets.

This takes precision tools, skill to
use them and an abundant well of patience and time, and both are in short
supply in the 8-5 world we live in. Some
precision shooters swear by pre-sorted, once-fired brass vs.
the stuff randomly
plucked from the range. Part of the reason is cartridge uniformity is already
improved in once fired brass, vs.
brass you pick up on the range. The time it takes to clean that brass and sort
it combined with not knowing whether the cartridge is from a once-fired round
verses one that has been shot two or three times. Each time the round is shot,
it stretches and now you have to expend more effort to make those rounds
uniform to the others. Nothing is prettier to the reloader or competitive
shooter than a box of perfectly matched rifle rounds. But don’t tell anyone.